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Valve Job Posting Confirms Hardware Plans
redletterdave writes "Valve is reportedly interested in building hardware. The Bellevue, Wash.-based software developer added a job posting to its site on Tuesday morning for an industrial designer. We're frustrated by the lack of innovation in the computer hardware space though, so we're jumping in,' the posting said. 'Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years. There's a real void in the marketplace, and opportunities to create compelling user experiences are being overlooked.'"
Well, at least we'll never have to buy more than two consoles from them.
Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years
Maybe the reason for this is the basic form works. The design of the wheel hasn't changed much in a 5 thousand years either. I wonder why.
One the one hand, this would be a very new business for Valve, even given their previous experience, which means it's a big risk. On the other hand, it seems like it's been impossible for Valve to not make money these days. Fun! I would love to see someone shake up the gaming hardware market, and they're certainly in an interesting position to do so.
Keyboard and mouse haven't changed significantly over the years because they work well. Until we have mind control , I doubt anybody will come up with something better than keyboard and mouse anytime soon.
As for built quality, well, that's another thing. Arguably, the quality of keyboards has constantly declined since Model M except for remakes like Unicomp and keyboards with Cherry switches. It would be great if Valves console had a great keyboard but somehow I doubt it...
I cannot wait to see what they will call it.
The possibilities are endless .
Maybe they can forget all this crap that no one REALLY wants and just finish Half Life 3.
Valve jobs are really expensive, so maybe just sell it and get a new car.
I'd love to have headcrab controller to play Half-Life2 with.
This follows their Steam on Linux plans and comments distancing themselves from Microsoft. Looks to me like they're getting ready to enter the console market in competition with the XBox and others. A free OS drives down console unit costs, no specialty hardware for driver development, and minimal porting costs based on earlier Mac and Linux efforts. As much as the geek crowd may love Linux (and I'm part of that group), don't fool yourself about the business side of porting for a desktop OS that can't even get into double digit percentage points. The comments about the mouse and keyboard are a McGuffin to mislead people as they develop a controller.
Like I said, seemed obvious to me back when Gabe made his earlier comments about Win8, the Microsoft AppStore, and releasing for Linux.
And we're going to charge you through the nose for it.
Novel business strategy. Well done, and good luck with that.
I thought the scroll wheel (mouse buttons 4 and 5) was for changing things on your current tool such as the zoom of a scope. That leaves either keys or thumb buttons for switching tools.
"Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years. There's a real void in the marketplace, and opportunities to create compelling user experiences are being overlooked"
Yeah, aside from the Wiimote and Kinect and every other product that has changed the input in a meaningful way.
It sounds to me like Valve is interested in developing a gaming laptop with Kinect-like functionality built in. That is an interesting idea, but it's nothing particularly revolutionary. Successful products are seldom revolutionary, so that's not a bad thing. Good luck Valve, with whatever it is you're doing!
Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years
Maybe the reason for this is the basic form works. The design of the wheel hasn't changed much in a 5 thousand years either. I wonder why.
I beg to differ. The basic design requirement of a wheel is that it's round and rolls, and I'll certainly grant you that this aspect of wheels hasn't changed. However, a rough-hewn wooden round, such as used in the simplest of carts, bears very little other resemblance to the three-spoked carbon-fiber performance bicycle wheels I see with some frequency on my morning bicycle commute. Sure, both are round and roll, but otherwise, there's thousands of years of difference between them.
So what are the design requirements for computer input? You could start by looking at the requirements of a keyboard and a mouse: 1) Must have all the keys required to input at least ASCII. 2) Must have some kind of pointer-device control, ideally with at least two buttons.
So sure, you can have your basic flat keyboard, and a basic mouse. Or you could have something quite different, like this, or this, or this, or this (what I'm actually using to type this message).
And that's not even looking into other possible input schemes, such as voice recognition, eye tracking, etc.
I applaud Valve's efforts to look into better ways of doing things. This kind of exploration is exactly what leads to new and better things.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
People who like PC can loathe console controllers. Certain recent high-profile games that should have been pure PC were instead console-oriented. Read: Duke Nukem 4ever and DC Universe Online.
By this, we mean limited weaponry or powers at any given time, presumably driven by console controller limitations or by standard console game concept.
And many of us on the PC say screw that. Game tanks, here's a quarter, buy a clue.
So the market is ripe for a controller lesser than a keyaboard but a lot more than a controller or joystick. It's also in need of some "mouser" targetting equivalent.
Good luck.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
and minimal porting costs
That depends on how Valve chooses which developers are allowed to release games on Steam. Will it be as open as Google Play Store or Mac App Store, or will it be as closed as Xbox Live Arcade and Wii Shop?
The comments about the mouse and keyboard are a McGuffin to mislead people as they develop a controller.
Do you mean MacGuffin, the thing in a story defined by the fact that everyone seeks it, or do you mean a red herring?
There have been some very annoying changes to the keyboard. I miss my old Genius keyboard. It looked something like this, but wihout that sleep button that you can see above and to the right of the arrow cluster, single row "Enter" key, "backslash key" on the row above the "Enter" key, and the "Backspace" key extending over where the backslash is in that picture. Those changes plus take away that sleep rubber key, and that's my perfect keyboard. Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere anymore no matter how hard I look. All the keyboards out there have been broken for some mysterious reason I can't understand.
I am one of those geeks who bring their own hardware to the office simply because I point blank refuse to work with cheap shit. In other industries this is perfectly normal, chefs, bakers, carpenters they all got their own tools and only a fool would try to come between a pro and his tools.
Yet in the office, people work behind the cheapest monitors that some boss could find and mice and keyboards that would be overpriced if they were free, which they were and which they are.
It seems people just think a penny a day is to much to spend on a decent office equipment. Well, call me a spender but I am willing to spend that penny.
Even in gaming this is true, for every gaming PC with an expensive video card, a top of the range CPU there is a better then 50% chance that PC will have the bare minimum of ram, a 5400 rpm HD specced for size to store the porn, a monitor in the sub 100 dollar range and a mouse and keyboard that fall apart if you dare to click more then one button per minute.
Valve can introduce all the hardware they want, unless they made it 100% free and stop their games from working without it, it won't sell because the average gamer won't spend on anything but a CPU/GPU.
See the above comment by the moron named blahplusplus who wines about wanting more buttons on his mouse. There are tons of mice available with more buttons, it just asks you to actually buy one and not use the one that you got when your dad gave you his old Dell.
People are lazy, cheap, stupid and filled with self-hate. If you want to introduce a new product and sell this, you got to know your customer and your customer is someone who is beyond contempt.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Come on. Jeri Ellsworth is working for them. I doubt she's writing PC games, duh. There was a hackaday article about that a quarter ago. I don't follow this industry and even I've known about it for a while. Sigh.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
console controllers, for example, are actually better for some games, such as platformers or racers, though not for FPS or RTS games
As I tried to type a long post on my Nexus 7 tablet a few days ago, I realized something. Pressing buttons on a keyboard or a gamepad is like touch typing, as the player memorizes where the buttons are relative to his thumbs' resting positions and uses the feel of the edges of the buttons to adjust his hand positioning. Using a mouse or touch screen, on the other hand, is like hunt and peck: see something on the screen, move your mouse, and click. Aiming in FPS and selecting units in RTS are nearly ideal hunt and peck tasks; platformers and fighting games need touch typing because movement is relative to the player's current position.
I've written more about this.
Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years.
The trackball? The joystick (which seems to almost be dead hardware compared to a decade ago)
I'm more of a old-school RPG / military strategy guy but for FPS I've occasionally wondered what a right hand joystick left hand trackball FPS interface would be like. Foot pedals would be interesting for a FPS interface, not some annoying wii-type thing where you have to jog to force exercise, but just constant pressure to move or jump or strafe or whatever.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Perhaps one arguable reason for the lack of innovation compared to periods in the past is the expense. I don't mean to frame this exclusively as a monetary issue. Dealing with patents and the current litigious climate I imagine it to be extremely difficult for the smaller guys to get a foothold who have traditionally been the ones to drive innovation. I realize this isn't the entire picture or else we wouldn't have exciting things happening on KickStarter. None the less I'm pleased to hear Valve taking an interest in developing hardware.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
They come from the PC world. I bet their hardware will be more PC-like (in terms of upgradability, release schedule, multi-purpose) than a gaming console which doesn't change for 8 years.
Valve has supported weird stuff like the Razer Hydra before. Here's hoping for compatibility with the Oculus Rift in their new hardware project!
...they will build the Portal Gun and send a cake to MS
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826153064
How the hell are you going to chord on that?!! useless.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Speculation:
A mouse that has a dedicated scroll wheel for hats.
Extra buttons for hat-based emotes: tip, straighten, salute, decapitating throw.
Two- and three- factor authentication.
Age recognition scanners to auto-ban 13-year-olds.
Hat-shaped controllers with force feedback.
Tickle-Me Companion Cube with lifelike 'clunking' sounds.
Wasn't the inability to 'override' a big part of the Air France (A320) flight 296 crash at an air show back in 1988?
No brain, no pain.
...after recent comments from Valve re. developing on Linux (easy to port to, better performance than DirectX, ability to work with / feedback commits to driver devs, etc) — plus Gabe Newell recently calling Windows 8 a catastrophe — I would not be at all surprised if we saw a Valve-branded Linux-based games console in the near future.
But maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part?
.xX | Mod Parent Up! | Xx.
The post is HIGH-larious!
And I will plug in my keyboard and mouse. Some people play games with their PC's. But some of us are running businesses and running the world. We need serious, stable desktops. Get off my lawn, gamer.
Write a high performance bug free driver for your new game controller or human interface device for all OS's and game consoles and portable devices. Build an API that is beautiful in its simplicity, power and understandability. DOCUMENT the API. Put Up a complete course on youtube on how to use your API. Make that learning curve easy for me to climb. Lots of sample code. Cut and Paste recipes. Open source it all. And the source needs to be in C first, with enough hooks that the avid scripters can make API's for their favourite languages. Gotta be in C.
LEGACY. You are going to want to upgrade at some point. Where does that leave you existing client base?
That is a big enough job right there. Put some numbers and milestones to the above. Labor requirements. Man years. End game it. Give me a vision that I can clearly see.
UNIX's orginal power came from modularity. Pipes, filters. etc. You don't need to take on Microsoft, Apple and Sony. You do not need a complete new OS. You do not need to roll out and maintain another Linux Distro. You do not need to start designing motherboards and diskcontrollers. You do not need to replace the C language.
Get the KDE and Gnome people to the table. Beer, Hookers, Coke, Diplomacy, Arm Twisting. A diplomat and some checks and plane tickets and some coercion from Oracle, Google, IBM and the other big linux players is what is needed to roll Linux Forward. Get them to a table. Get out of the labs and into the hotels and party zone.
Lots of code got written in the last decade. Linux has expanded in all directions. And Thus it was good, very very good.
Now what is needed is consolidation. Keep the the good stuff, and some pruning and deleting.
This requires POLITICS AND DIPLOMACY.
Software and Hardware cannot solve all political problems.
This is not a win / lose between KDE and GNOME. Everybody is losing now. It is time to consolidate and make a winner for everybody.
My first thought was that they might want to get in on the VR headgear market.
In case you're not just trying to CMTP, let me rephrase: Wheels not covered by treads work just fine for moderately light-weight vehicles traveling over relatively smooth terrain. But tanks use treads over their wheels because that is better for what they need.
Holy crap. That alpha grip thing looks like the most awesome and convenient input method ever. Does it actually work like they market it? :O
I looked into alternate keyboards years ago when repetitive stress was threatening to render me unable to work, and the AlphaGrip was the best option at the time. The other alternates I found were several hundred dollars and with no return policies, while the AlphaGrip was maybe $100 and had a one-month try-it-out period. So I gave it a month, and liked it enough that I now have two (one for my day job, and one for home).
That said, there's definitely a learning curve -- don't expect to type very fast for the first few weeks. But the layout is also different enough that you don't overwrite your muscle memory for regular flat keyboards. I tried Dvorak typing, but hated it whenever I had to use a Qwerty machine; meanwhile, I can switch between using an AlphaGrip and a regular flat keyboard with no finger confusion. The built-in track ball means you can stand up and pace if you want and still get work done. And the shape is different enough that I was able to avoid the repetitive stress issues that were being caused by my use of a flat keyboard + mouse.
YMMV and all that, naturally. :)
(FWIW, I'm not connected with the AlphaGrip company in any way other than as a satisfied customer.)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years."
There is a reason why: You're up against evolution, and the keyboard/mouse combo has been the clear winner for decades. Every attempt to create something that is better or faster than the keyboard/mouse combination in the past 20 years hasn't come close. This is why Xbox Live doesn't allow PC players and Xbox players to multiplay - Microsoft tried it and quiety killed it when it was discovered that the worst keyboard/mouse players could regularly mop the floor with console thumb controllers. Remember American McGee hawking the Orb controller in the late 90's? It was the closest thing to a Maybe the industry has seen, but it it too died because it couldn't come close to matching the input speed of a mouse.
The only way to beat the mouse is with something that tracks rapid acceleration, deceleration, and distance travelled of the hand on a 2D table top better than a mouse. Doing it in 3D space won't cut it because nobody wants to hold their hand in space for hours on end. Good luck.
Jerry Ellsworth, Jeff Keyzer and a few other hardware devs were sucked up by Valve months ago.
Sounds like you've been doing a bit too much of that coke yourself there, cowboy.
Valve is an adjunct to the game industry. They want to make game controllers. They don't care about serving you or the business world.
If they are feeling frustrated with the status quo, then that means they probably have a list of really good ideas they wish somebody would implement. If they're willing to stop complaining and do it themselves, then that's worthy of respect, not the crazed ravings of some clueless nitwit.
Bye now.
What world do YOU live in?
The gamers I know have the best gear on the planet, and they're pretty decent and well liked to boot.
Self hate? Good god, man! You seriously need to change circles and find some new friends. Water rises to its own level and all that. The fact you notice it means you're ready to move on!
You wanna make a game computer, super great, but I don't see their reasoning
"We're frustrated by the lack of innovation in the computer hardware space"
what? video cards keep getting more powerful and add hardware accelerated features, CPU's as well, monitors get bigger and sometimes more pixels and you the developers have damn near infinite amounts of ram and storage. Its not the lack of innovation in hardware, its YOU damn developers who wont get past your XBOX360 specs from over a half decade ago and never looking at anything else.
"'Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years."
Cause for many types of game it works very well
"There's a real void in the marketplace,"
Where? Its not in computer hardware, you just ignore that it exists, Its not in computer input cause you can get or adapt any type of controller imaginable for a PC, the only void I have seen is that theres not that much software thats little more than an after thought console port.
It sure would be fun they would dive into HDMI and Thunderbolt.
Drop all special purpose gfx/audio/networking circuits like DSP to make drivers really simple and make them do exactly what they are intended to do gfx-> framebuffer, drive monitors audio -> produce sound, A/D conversion network -> remove dsp functions and use cpu + opencl PCIe cards to do all the math.
As an avid PC gamer for a decade who in the past 4+ years has defected to consoles I consistently like games with less buttons. If I need 83 buttons on my mouse plus all 100 buttons on my keyboard to play a game I'm not interested (which yes, means I'm not interested in flight sims).
For example, have an "up" button and a "down" button. DON'T have jump,climb,duck,rappel,lie-on-ground,swim-up,swim-down and shimmy-up-drainpipe buttons.
I remember spending many years playing and coding half life mods and seeing that sort of thing a lot. One mod had lie-on-ground and crouch as separate buttons (in my mod you just pressed "down" again when crouched, and double-tapping "down" when stood up worked plenty fast enough. Another that springs to mind is TFC where the Demoman had to have a seperate set-a-detpack button instead of it just being a type of grenade.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I even gave it a nickname: Project Sauna.
Let's see how close my call mimics reality.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.